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Both Sides Now 4

In its fourth year, Both Sides Now examines new models of making moving image influenced by internet and videogame culture. Showing work made in the past four years, the programme explores new aesthetics, visual languages and digital forms that are native to the internet, and that comment upon local and global politics, society, globalisation and science.

Both Sides Now presents contemporary and historical film and video work from the UK, Hong Kong and China, curated by Isaac Leung of Videotage and Jamie Wyld of videoclub. The films explore developments within the culture and society of Hong Kong and China over the past three decades, including work which reflects on the ongoing dynamics of cultures in Hong Kong, China, and the UK.

FILM PROGRAMME

We will begin the screening with a introduction by Jamie Wyld from videoclub.

Farsight Corporate Promo, Lawrence Lek, single channel video HD, 2017, 5’05”
Set in 2037, Play Station takes place in a science fiction version of the White Chapel Building, transformed into the headquarters of a mysterious technology start-up known as Farsight. A world leader in digital automation, Farsight trains employees to outsource their jobs as much as possible, rewarding top performers with access to exclusive entertainment and e-holidays.
Access to this virtual world is through a mandala-like installation of VR headsets, video training guides, and voiceover tutorials. Housed in the cavernous atrium of the recently re-invented White Chapel Building, Play Station reflects on the continuously changing boundaries between workplace and playground.

Selachimorpha, Joey Holder, single channel video HD, 2017, 5’10”

Selachimorpha contains a clip from the film Jaws where a shooting star can be clearly seen in the sky behind the hero Roy Scheider. Certain internet commentary has suggested that this is a UFO, as it can’t be easily explained due to the large red trajectory that appears in a trail behind it.

The sighting of it in this particular film is of some poignancy. Like space, the ocean is a largely unexplored territory, and therefore a rich breeding ground for myths and conspiracies. Mistakes about marine life have ranged from inaccurate assumptions about the behaviour of known species to fanciful depictions of animals that “might” exist.

Morphing between factual and fictional creatures, symbols and memes the film reflects on our continual shifting belief systems.

boredomresearch’s artwork is informed by principles of scientific modelling, inspired by the mechanisms and behaviours of natural systems. Central to their work is the aesthetic expression of intriguing patterns, motions and forms, expressed in real-time over extended durations, using technologies usually associated with computer games. AfterGlow (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered) is a film made using sequences from their real-time digital artwork; informed by models of disease transmission, on Banggi Island in Malaysia. Locked in perpetual twilight (prime mosquito blood-feeding time), the film presents a terrain progressively illuminated by glowing trails, evocative of mosquito flight paths.

Repetition and distortion drive this audiovisual collaboration between composer Lux Prima and visual artist Max Hattler, where fuzzy analogue music and geometric digital animation collide in an electronic feedback loop, and spawn arrays of divisional articulations in time and space.

Weresheglanspertheere is a digital animation that takes as its source material documentary images and sounds found on the Internet. It examines the impact of unreliable juxtapositions of sounds and images on both the intellectual and emotional response of the viewer. The heavily abstracted and recreated found content investigates the position of a witness to the nonfictional events presented.

Copy is right!, Joseph CHEN, single channel video HD, 2016, 3’28”

Copy is right! is a satirical remix sampling stock imagery, sound effects, and pop music downloaded from the Internet. Colliding dialogues are generated from a tailor-made application utilizing the voice of the Apple synthesizer. By manipulating intellectual property and open-source software, the video reimagines the legal and illegal narratives traversing computational input, Internet-based technology, and social media under current conditions of techno-capitalism.

Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, IP Yuk-Yiu, single channel video HD, 2012, 15’30”

Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (九龍百哀圖) is a virtual study and a digital portrait of Hong Kong as seen through the lens of contemporary popular culture incarnated in the forms of video game and screen media.Using the map “KOWLOON” from the popular video game Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) as a field of study, the filmmaker conducted a yearlong virtual fieldwork: playing, observing and documenting “Hong Kong” as simulated in the video game world.

Kungfu Disco, Jeff LI, single channel video HD, 2016, 1’40”

Kungfu Disco is a video collage made of found footage and animation. By means of de-structuring and restructuring classic film archive footage, this project interrogates the delicate entanglement between kungfu, disco, and the human body. Besides the interplay of moving images created by different mediums, Kungfu Disco also presents an environment that taps into the unconscious visual experience.

The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers deals with hallucination, mental illness, doppelgängers, and artificial intelligence. This is the story of Rosy, who found an early fascination with spirals, hallucinatory psychedelics, schizophrenic episodes, and has since joined the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). Ultimately, she has uploaded her consciousness to cyberspace and thereby lives her life as an animated character. The exploration of digital consciousness and virtual reality is an important progression of Su’s artistic practice, which had long investigated the limits of the mind-body duality in man-organic and man-bionic/prosthetic hybrids.

Window on the World (Part 1) is a work that forms part of the artist’s long-term endeavor on the unconscious relationships between sci-fi and Cantonese opera, the structure built in the exhibition departs from the oceanic landscape appearing in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and its infinite horizon of islets. In this work the vortex of space conquest collides with the vortex of antiquity, becoming a site where a Chinese sci-fi plot is imagined. The work was originally commissioned by Para Site and Spring Workshop for the group exhibition Islands Off the Shores of Asia and is made in collaboration with Thomas Tsang / DeHow Projects.